I took a stab at trying to figure out how much land it takes to power an internal combustion engine vehicle with ethanol vs what it takes to power an electric vehicle with solar energy.

The links in the embedded spreadsheet show my data sources. If any of these are inaccurate (or my calculations are wrong) please let me know.

Based on what I’m seeing, it looks like it takes a bit more than an acre of farmland dedicated to growing corn to power a single vehicle. That’s based on the amount of E85 fuel it would take, so it would also take some non-ethanol fuel to make that work.

For the electric car numbers, I used a watts/mile figure found on some Tesla forums and a land use calculation based on typical production of panels in large ground-mount systems. This came to 0.015 acres or 652 sq ft.

It seems like it’s quite a bit more efficient to convert solar energy into electricity, transfer that into car batteries, then use that power to turn an electric engine than it is to convert solar energy into plants, harvest those plants, convert those plants into ethanol, transfer that energy into car tanks, and convert that energy into small explosions to turn an internal combustion engine. If my numbers are correct, it looks like it’s around 70X more efficient from a land needed per vehicle perspective.

While this could be looked at from a “what’s the best use of farmland?” perspective, it’s obviously worth noting that solar panels can be placed on a lot of surfaces other than farmland, including places that don’t consume any land, like rooftops.

Another thing to consider: The cost to power an electric car can be significantly cheaper than what’s shown in the spreadsheet if you take advantage of electric vehicle charging and/or time of day pricing plans. Off-peak electricity rates (when your car is likely sitting in your garage) are far cheaper than standard residential rates.

But, wouldn’t that mean that you wouldn’t be using solar to charge your car? Correct. It looks like the future – at least in Minnesota – will involve powering our homes with solar & wind during the day and charging our vehicles with wind power overnight.

The Boomer goes to YouTube and searches for “how to change a lightbulb”:

They click on a result for a DIY video. While watching the video, they see this related video:

After watching a pre-roll ad, they learn this nugget 11 seconds into the video:

Having satisfied their curiosity about millennials and lightbulbs, they see a video from a young man offering more information about what’s wrong with millennials:

After consuming 4 minutes of content on what’s wrong with kids these days (explained by a kid these days), YouTube auto-plays a nearly 2-hour video called, “Ben Shapiro: Toughen Up Spoiled Children”.

At some point during those two hours, they notice a compelling video about illegal immigration:

After consuming some content from an ex-felon right-wing propagandist, it was time for something lighter, like a video with Jay Leno making people feel smart by cherry picking geographically challenged Americans.

After two-plus hours of consuming right-wing propaganda, they remain in the dark.

The majority of the right-wing propaganda videos that were suggested by YouTube and clicked on by the Boomer were paid for by a handful of conservative billionaires who benefit from intergenerational fights rather than watching Americans come together to realize that their common interest is to not be screwed over by billionaires who are trying to destroy our air, water, public education and healthcare systems.

There’s a special place in hell for robo-callers who exploit seniors. Bilking retirees out of their retirements through scams over the phone is downright evil.

But, at least the robo-callers have to go through the effort of finding exploitable seniors.

Social media companies make it fairly easy to identify vulnerable seniors so you can fast-track exploitations.

How? By allowing conspiracy theorists and fake news publishers to use their platforms.

Social media platforms allow garbage content to flourish on their platforms because they make money from it and/or they don’t want to be accused of censoring garbage content.

But, how does that lead to the exploitation of vulnerable seniors?

Social media platforms allow advertisers to reach very specific audiences, which can be a good thing but can also be used to cause harm. Say you want to reach everyone who lives in a specific state for political advertising, or people who follow a specific political candidate. No problem. Or, you want to advertise to people who like a certain sports team or brand of granola bars so you can attempt to sell products to that may interest people who have those interests. Great.

But, you can also run ads targeting people who follow conspiracy theorists. Why would you do that? Because you can sell anything to people who’ll believe anything. Social media platforms make that easy to do.

I’ve tried to find an example of a vulnerable senior without showcasing one in order to help explain this further. Here’s my attempt.

I searched for “contrails” to find some conspiracy theory believers and found a woman who posted a pic along with text that makes it clear that she’s a true believer that the government is spraying chemicals on Americans from planes during daylight hours. I clicked on her profile and found out that she’s a Catholic MAGA supporter. I then looked her up on Facebook to make sure that she’s a real person. She’s a grandmother living in Northern California.

She believes some crazy stuff, including this:

She’s not alone. Just look at how many people liked and retweeted that garbage.

Say you wanted to do something relatively harmless, like sell WiFi routers to conspiracy theorists by inferring that a certain WiFi router is safer than others:

I then targeted people over 50 who live in the United States who’re the kind of people who follow garbage conspiracy theory accounts on Twitter. I expanded the reach a bit by adding qanon76 as an additional Twitter conspiracy account to leverage to find dupable people.

To increase the reach of the ads further, Twitter’s brilliant programmers have figured out how to find larger lookalike audiences. Here’s who their algorithms suggest adding to my “accounts followed by people susceptible to right-wing conspiracy theories” portfolio:

Not surprisingly, it suggests including Seb Gorka, Jack Posobiec, and Dan Bogino, among others. (Imagine being a member of the House of Representatives and showing up on such a distilled list of garbage people. That would make you Rep. Jim Jordan or Rep. Devin Nunes.)

I added a few of those names to my portfolio and Twitter suggested even more garbage accounts to follow in order to increase my reach. These include one of the president’s sons, the official account of the White House Press Secretary, Sarah Sanders, Kellyanne Conway, and quite a few FOX News show hosts:

But, I don’t want to reach all of the followers of mainstream right-wing misinformation accounts. I just want to distill an audience of the truly dupable.

So, why can I do this? Because Twitter allows garbage to exist on their platform. Think about the advantages for social media companies compared to mainstream media sources. If you tried to put a show on the air or print content that appealed to fringe audiences like this in a mainstream media outlet you’d be laughed at, and face protests against advertisers. For example, Sleeping Giants has been quite successful at getting advertisers to stop advertising on Breitbart and many FOX News shows. But that’s largely a case of mainstream businesses running ads on relatively mainstream media platforms.

What social media advertising allows is for fringe advertisers to reach fringe groups who’ve demonstrated through their online behavior that they’ll believe anything. This is an audience that’s ripe for exploitation by nefarious businesses interested in tapping into the retirement savings of the elderly. It’s a self-service way to reach soft targets, and you don’t even need to pick up the phone.

A group of Minneapolis residents have organized themselves in an effort to continue Minneapolis’ long history of exclusionary zoning. They, sadly, use the name Minneapolis For Everyone as their brand while lobbying to keep new multi-family developments out of their neighborhoods.

It’s a “Minneapolis is for everyone as long as they’re not too close to us” approach to welcoming new neighbors.

They have a petition. Their petition claims to have over 3,000 signatures from people in support of their preference for McMansions over multi-family housing.

I decided to take a look at their petition’s signatures.

To do this, I copied their signatures into a Google spreadsheet.

I noticed that some people listed locations that were not only not in Minneapolis, but weren’t even in the United States of America. So I counted them.

I noticed that some of the people who signed the petition seemed to pop up more than once, so I counted how many unique signatures appear on the petition (note the lower-right corner):

If there are fewer unique names on the petition than total signatures, there must be some duplicates, right? So I counted the duplicates and found quite a few ambitious signers:

A follower of the Minneapolis 2040 Plan debate might notice that elected official, Carol Becker, has signed the petition she’s using to influence politicians, twice.

I also noticed that a some of the redlining maintenance signers weren’t willing to attach their full name to their opinions. Here’s a list of people who’re opposed to having neighbors sharing a property enough to sign a petition but not enough to sign their full name:

Alfred

Anne

Anthony

Ashley

Brad

Brenda

Brianna

Carol

Cathy

Christina

cindi

Claire

ClareP

Craig

Derek

Diachina

Hallie

Jacob

Jennie

Jill

Joan

Joe

Joe

Joe

Joe

Joe

Joe

Jorge

Julie

kaitryne

Karina

Kathleen

Katy

Kent

Kerry

Kristin

laura

Lucy

Mann

Martin

Michaela

MRutt

MRutt

Paige

Ryan

Shea

Shelley

Tera

Tera

Tera

Tera

Tera

Tera

Terri

Valérie

What if we look at the most popular first names of signers? Here is a list of the most popular first names among the anti-Minneapolis 2040 crowd:

And last names:

When I think about what the future of Minneapolis looks like, I’m not sure that the Johnsons, Andersons, Larsons, Nelsons, Petersons, Hansons, Olsons, Wilsons, Masons, Bensons, Carlsons, and Christophersons fully represent our future.

Will the Marys, Johns, Susans, and Marks have a place to live? Of course. As John Edwards from Wedge Live (Wedge Live the blog, not the podcast focused on “wedge issues”) has put it, the examples above represent the spectrum of Minneapolis residents ranging from single-family homeowners with mortgages to those who’ve paid off their mortgages.

“Son of ” names are popular Mexican surnames too (ending in “-ez”). I decided to check a list of the top-10 Mexican surnames to see how often they popped up on the anti-Minneapolis 2040 petition. It turns out that they did. One of them. Once.

Last Name – Signatures

Hernandez – 0

Garcia – 0

Lopez – 0

Martìnez – 0

Rodrìguez – 0

Gonzalez – 0

Perez – 0

Sanchez – 1

Gomez – 0

Flores – 0

My hope is that our elected officials (other than Carol Becker) will find this helpful when considering the size of the anti-2040 audience along with their diversity and weigh that against what our city truly looks like today and what it will look like in the future.

Here are some charts summarizing bill activity at the capital this past legislative session.

Median number of bills authored: 33A summary of the bills that received no action such as committee hearings, committee reports, or even the addition of a co-author.A summary of the bills that received at least one action such as committee hearings, committee reports, or even the addition of a co-author.The percentage of each author’s bills that received at least one action such as committee hearings, committee reports, or even the addition of a co-author.A count of the number of bills by author that became law.A percentage of the bills by author that became law.

My one takeaway: If you wanted to get something done in the MN House, having Jim Newberger take the lead would be a very poor choice. There was an 80% chance that the bill would go nowhere, and only a 2.8% chance of a bill authored by him becoming law. And that’s with his party in charge of the MN House and Senate.

What bill did he manage to pass? A gift to Xcel Energy that says anyone can build a natural gas power plant:

provided that the plant is located on property in Sherburne County, Minnesota, already owned by the public utility, and will be constructed after January 1, 2018.

Keep that in mind if you ever hear Jim Newberger saying anything about wanting a free market.

One argument from anti-Minneapolis 2040 Plan that I find strange is the argument that multi-family housing doesn’t improve affordability.

As I see it, the choice we’re facing in neighborhoods where single-family home prices have appreciated significantly is a choice between watching smaller homes and homes in disrepair be torn down and replaced with large single-family homes or similarly sized multi-family properties. The affordability difference between those choices is the cost to live in a unit of a duplex, triplex, or fourplex, vs a 2000+ square foot single-family home.

If affordability was truly a concern for the anti-Minneapolis 2040 plan, there are other things they could do to help keep our existing housing stock somewhat affordable. Here’s a quick list:

This list probably seems pretty ridiculous. Who would oppose changes like that? The point is that single-family homeowners who’re opposed to the Minneapolis 2040 Plan have no problem with people maintaining and upgrading their homes in ways that will increase their home’s value and decrease the home’s affordability.

However, if a property owner increases their property’s value by converting or rebuilding it to accommodate more than one household (another way to increase a property’s value within the same square feet), there is a risk that their entire neighborhood may collapse into the nearest lake or river.

You know how once you buy a new car you start to see that same make and model of car wherever you go? Having solar panels is kind of like that. I now tend to notice every new solar installation going in around the neighborhood. And, a lot are going it. The pace is picking up.

But, how many are there? Why not count them? So I did. I started with Google satellite view. Panels are pretty easy to spot from satellite images. I started boxing out the blocks where I found at least one property with panels (electric or water). The satellite data appears to be pretty recent, but not recent enough to capture many of this summer’s installations so I also biked around the neighborhood to see if I could find any more, and I did.

Here’s what I found:

If you know of any blocks with at least one solar panel installation that’s not on the map let me know. Or, if I have any false-positives also let me know.

A few thoughts:

1. I wasn’t the first on my block. A neighbor beat me to it by a few years.

2. The distribution throughout the neighborhood is pretty good. The panels aren’t grouped just among areas with higher priced homes. I imagine this is because solar has become quite affordable, and some solar companies are offering financing plans with little to no money down.

3. There are no panels on any homes along Edmund (the residential street along the parkway). This appears to be due to a combination of things including trees, house alignment, roof alignment, and style of roofs. But, there certainly are some good candidates for solar there.

4. Most of the new single-family homes being built in the neighborhood (that’s the only type of home we legally allow these days) are large, tall, and built in an east-west alignment so are great candidates for solar. There tend to be no trees competing for light on their roof, and wouldn’t be for at least 30 years if one was planted today. And, due to height restrictions in place now and under the Minneapolis 2040 plan, they don’t have to be concerned about losing their roof light. Also, putting panels on a roof is best when a roof is new. It doesn’t have to be brand new, but you wouldn’t want to put panels on a roof that’s going to need to be replaced soon. So, get on that if you can.

5. There are a couple sleeper solar installations in the neighborhood. Nearly all solar installations can be seen while driving by but there is energy being made in Longfellow in places that can’t be seen from a street. These include on top of Ghandi Mahal restaurant and solar PV and water installation on the back of a house along 47th Ave.

6. Our public buildings are great candidates for solar. For example, Howe Elementary could likely support 15-20X more solar production on its roof than a typical residential installation in the neighborhood. It turns out that there are creative ways to get systems like this built in order to generate energy savings for the school with no upfront costs. If Farmington, MN schools can do it, we should be able to get it done.

7. Target has a ton of solar installations nationwide, but not on our Target. They may want to make that happen in order to stay ahead of WalMart for deployed solar.

8. This Longfellow resident has a creative solar installation that combines roof-mounted panels with panels used as awnings:

This increases their square footage for solar production while also providing passive solar benefits by reducing the amount of high summer sun heating up their home (while allowing in heat from the lower winter sun). Awnings are underrated from an energy savings perspective.

So, who will be first on your block so we can turn it green?

Here’s a screenshot of the map above from August 5, 2018. I’m sure we’ll see quite a bit more green over time.

If you’re into audiobooks (ex. Audible) or ebooks (ex. Kindle) you should check out Libby. It lets you download both formats of books from your library for free.

Hennepin County at St Paul public libraries both appear to use it (I’ve only tried it with Hennepin). I just plugged in my library card number and PIN to get started. There isn’t an unlimited number of copies of the downloads so you may need to put a hold on some titles. It also allows you to filter for books available for immediate download. And, like audiobooks and ebooks in general, not every book is available in every media format.

For ebooks, you can search Libby for an ebook, then have it download your Kindle or the free Kindle app (which you can download for free to your phone, tablet, computer, etc. from your app store).

I’m no expert on the Minneapolis 2040 planning goals but I feel like I’ve been paying attention. I’ve read news stories, blog posts, NextDoor comments, attended community meetings and discussed this topic with friends and neighbors.

Here are a few observations based on those experiences:

1. The vast majority of people opposed to the upzoning proposals are far older and whiter than the city overall. The main issue they have is a proposal that would allow people to redevelop their single-family home into a duplex, triplex, or fourplex, as long as they stayed within the height and area restrictions currently in place for single-family development. If you’ve ever been to my house, you may or may not have noticed that the property next to mine of nearly identical size is a high/low duplex. That property would is illegal to build under current zoning. It turns out that older white people feel threatened by properties like that one.

2. If we maintain the status quo, people will still be able to remodel or tear down and redevelop single-family properties. They’ll continue to be restricted to building a single-family home, so – as we’ve seen in Linden Hills – we’ll see smaller and/or run down properties replaced with homes that maximize square footage on city lots. As a city, we’ll end up with more expensive housing stock but it won’t move the needle much on the number of city residents. Granted, there is a greater chance of a family of 4+ living in a 2,000 square foot home than a less than 1,000 square foot home so there could be some growth is residents.

3a. Affordability. Some eyeballing of projects in Longfellow and Linden Hills suggests to me that redeveloping a tear-down as a new single-family home more than doubles the property’s value. For example, a property selling for $200k or less in Longfellow will likely be worth $400K or more once redeveloped as a new, larger, home. In Linden Hills, the same math applies but with around a 50% bump for both of those figures. We do not keep neighborhoods affordable by doubling home prices one lot at a time.

3b. Affordability. If the same square footage is used to build a duplex, the property’s overall value may double but the cost to live on that property will remain near where it was before. This doubles the number of households who can afford to live on that property and in that neighborhood rather than pricing them both out.

4. Racial history. Like many cities, Minneapolis had racial covenants on many properties that made it illegal to sell your property to anyone who wasn’t white. Once that was outlawed, we switched to discriminating based on lending practices such as redlining that made it impossible for non-white people to receive government-backed financing on mortgages for properties in white neighborhoods. Once that was outlawed – and white people had spent a few generations building out neighborhoods in desirable parts of town – cities adopted zoning ordinances that banned multi-family housing. It’s the “We’re not racist. We just don’t want to live around people who don’t happen to be as wealthy as we’ve become.” system.

5. Liberals not walking the walk. I see many older white people who’re opposed to the Minneapolis 2040 plan who absolutely hate Trump, are positive that climate change is real, understand that college students are saddled with a ton more debt at graduation than previous generations, and would absolutely not consider themselves to be racist. Yet, when they have a chance to walk the walk by adopting a real-world change that could help address these issues they aren’t being proactive. They’re being vehemently reactive.

6. Population trends. I hear some people opposed to changing zoning saying that young people will regret the loss of single-family homes once they have families. What’s changed since people who’ve paid off their mortgage bought their houses?

– The average family size is declining (not rapidly, but it is)
– People are getting married later
– More people are divorced
– More people are living longer as empty nesters
– More people are living longer as widows or widowers
– More people are hamstrung with college loans
– The cost of having one infant in daycare is similar to a mortgage payment on a $250k home.

Many people like this would like to live in safe, quiet, neighborhoods, but don’t need – or can’t afford – a single-family home. These are people who’re being pushed out of neighborhoods by people opposing change (while, hypocritically, putting All Are Welcome Here signs in their yards).

I have heard from some older people who think it’s impossible to raise a child in Minneapolis without a backyard. As someone with young kids and basically no backyard, I’ve found that it’s not necessary to have a private park in a city that has so many public parks. We walk, bike, or drive to parks with different amenities, and enjoy interacting with neighbors and friends from schools. We do have some areas of town that are, sadly, underserved by parks. They also happen to be where old white people seem to be more interested in corralling renters.

Housing that allows people to save money, spend less time maintaining a yard, and on a block that’s safe for kids to bike around is a good thing.

7. Radical change? Think about this: If the most run-down home in Kenwood is torn down and replaced with a new fourplex (assuming the lot is large enough to accommodate that) what type of neighbors do you think would live there? The cost of housing in Kenwood would still be much higher than the city average so you’d end up living next to people who can afford something like $1,800 or more in monthly rent payments? Is that threatening to someone with a $4,000+ mortgage?

8. Less affluent neighborhoods. So far, most of what I’ve discussed has been from the perspective of Minneapolis’ more affluent neighborhoods from Kenwood to Longfellow, from the lakes, along the creek, to the river. What about other neighborhoods that haven’t had the same upward pricing pressure? At the other extreme would be neighborhoods with empty lots today. There are lots available in Minneapolis for under $25k in some neighborhoods. There are quite a few factors contributing to this. Quality of neighborhood schools, safety, expectations of home appreciation, and racism are some examples. But, another one is that it’s tough to justify building a single-family home on an empty lot if the home can’t sell or rent for what it costs to build. If people had the option to build something other than single-family homes on those lots, perhaps the market would find ways to develop some of them without subsidies? It would be great to see additional efforts being made to redevelop those lots – including public investments – and I definitely don’t believe that rezoning alone will solve all problems.

Granted, we would have more money to invest in neighborhoods in need of help if old white people were willing to accept a few more neighbors.

9. Affordable housing vs housing that’s affordable. I have seen some cases of people talking past each other regarding affordable housing. Here is HUD’s definition:

AFFORDABLE HOUSING: In general, housing for which the occupant(s) is/are paying no more than 30 percent of his or her income for gross housing costs, including utilities. Please note that some jurisdictions may define affordable housing based on other, locally determined criteria and that this definition is intended solely as an approximate guideline or general rule of thumb.

If a neighborhood is already unaffordable by that criteria, redeveloping a single-family home as a McMansion or duplex will likely not solve that problem. However, redeveloping the property into housing that’s cheaper than a McMansion (the only type of housing we’ll see replacing tear downs under current zoning) provides more affordable housing than a McMansion provides, and does so for more people.

10. What are the alternatives for zoned-out future residents? If we price out first-time homebuyers via exclusionary zoning they’ll still need a place to live. Some will “drive until they qualify” for a mortgage, leading to more carbon being spewed into the city as they commute in, more complaints about congestion, and more complaints about parking. These are self-inflicted wounds caused by self-described Liberals. They’re less concrete changes to see than having a new, nearly as wealthy, renter as a neighbor but they’re no less real. We can do better.